Lesson Highs and Lows

Saturday morning I had my cello lesson, and it began beautifully. I did a smooth, beautiful tonalization sequence of arpeggios, and it was really even and balanced and in tune and soft and there are lots of other pretty words I could use to describe it because it was almost perfect. My teacher asked me how I felt about it and I kind of shrugged and said, "It was nice. I liked it." (Which was an understatement, because I had been amazed at how smooth and effortless it had been, but it was a warm-up and I hadn't been paying very close attention when I did it.) She said, "Well, I have goosebumps! That was beautiful!" And she was partly kidding, and partly not. But then everything started to go downhill, until it hit the usual point about two-thirds of the way through the lesson where it can't get any worse and I start to freeze up because nothing I do works and I waver between abject misery and anger. I know what happens: my teacher starts pointing out things we need to fix and I try to keep it all in my mind, and the more I try to think about everything (bring the left elbow forward a degree more when shifting up and crossing a string, wrap the bow around the string by moving the right elbow forward or back, pronate hands, caterpillars, tunnels) the worse I play. Adding more things to the list of things I need to constantly check clogs up my brain and I start dropping basic things I've already internalized. It's part of the learning process, but not a part I especially enjoy.

My teacher has an analogy for this: It's like the drive shaft on a set of train wheels. At first it feels like you're moving forward, but then the drive shaft starts going through the second half of the cycle and the illusion of going backward is created, even though the overall unit is still moving forward. And if I think about it I'm doing things now that I couldn't do two months ago. But that doesn't particularly comfort me at the two-thirds point of the lesson. My teacher told me as I was packing up to remember the tonalization, though, and to remind myself frequently that I have the wherewithal to make that beautiful sound.

It's also rather frustrating because I've been spending so much practise time on the orchestra music and not paying attention to my lesson stuff, and as a result when I played the Lee that I'd played well a month ago it was awful and we had to spend time addressing the problems there. The plan for two spring/early summer concerts has been dropped (not directly related to how poorly I'm doing, but rather to people not all being available) and so I don't need to worry about having it ready until a month after the original deadline, which after this past lesson is a good thing.

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* The original post at Owls' Court
* Owls' Court: the main journal
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